Peril Sensitive Windscreens

There are some great things about owning a new car.

It’s nice to sit in. I don’t know where the ‘new car smell’ is generated in nature, but I like it. I expect it to start in the morning, unlike the old one where I was just pleased when it started. Subtle difference. It speeds up, slows down and goes around corners with less fuss than the old one. The old one does all these things, but it has more in common with a slightly decrepit amusement park than a car when it does them. And the new one is very clean.

There are some not so great things, like really caring about where you park. That was an extra stress I should’ve seen coming, and most importantly, the newly revealed terror of driving in the real world.

“What Grey Area? You weren’t driving in the real world before?” I hear you say.

Well not really. The old car had done a lot of kilometres. If you read this blog regularly, you know that it was closing in on 750,000 of them. There is a level of distress that happens to all things when they travel that much. It has driven over so many lumps and bumps that every bit of the car has moved further away from every other bit.

You know how nuts can loosen themselves off over time? Well that happened to the old car on a grand scale. So much so, it is two and a half centimetres longer now than when it was bought. That’s nice isn’t it? To think that if you drive a car enough, you can improve the leg room in the back. (That last bit is not entirely true.)

But it's not driving a rag-doll floppy car that shifts you out of reality. When everything is relaxed like that, it just makes it like driving a powerful cloud. What really divorces you from the current time-space continuum is dirt.

There is a level of dirt that a windscreen collects, both inside and out, that cannot be cleaned off when a car has done that sort of distance. The windscreen wipers don’t put their back into it quite they way they should either, they sort of lob themselves across the thing in a dissolute attempt to make it to the other side.

This new car has a crystal clear windscreen and muscular, no-nonsense windscreen wipers that make me realise I’ve been driving around in blind, blissful ignorance.

I can see what you’re all doing on the roads now, and it’s terrifying. You are a pack of maniacs and I can’t see how any of us are going to survive.